26 July 2015 1:30 AM

Is David Cameron the man who will destroy freedom in order to save it? His strange, wild speech on Monday suggests that he is. Mr Cameron, as careful observers already know, has a surprisingly poor grasp of history and politics and does not seem to be very clever.

The reception given to his outburst was mostly friendly, all across what is supposed to the spectrum of media opinion – though increasingly it is not a spectrum but a monolithic bloc.

Did they read it? I did. It is full of seething organic free-range tripe.

He actually tries to pretend that Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War has had nothing to do with the development of resentful Islamist militancy here. He does this by saying that the September 11 attack on Manhattan took place before the Iraq War.

Indeed it did. It was motivated – as one of the hijackers, Abdulaziz al-Omari, made clear in his own recorded testament – by Arab fury over America’s support for Israel, and the continued presence of US troops on Saudi soil. And it succeeded in changing US policy on both.

Strong words: David Cameron gave a speech on terrorism on Britain on Monday and how the country will face the challenges ahead going forward

Terror is rational. Terrorists know that it works, or why has the USA started supporting the two-state solution in Israel which it long opposed, and why is Martin McGuinness invited to Windsor Castle these days?

If Mr Cameron doesn’t like terrorism, then he wouldn’t have met Mr McGuinness and the even ghastlier IRA mouthpiece, Gerry Adams, at Downing Street last week. But he did. How can that be if, as the Prime Minister says, ‘British resolve saw off the IRA’s assaults on our way of life’. Oddly, you only saw the pictures of this pair meeting Jeremy Corbyn on the same day. The Downing Street meeting was not, it seems, filmed.

But that’s only a part of the problem. Mr Cameron claimed that we have, in this country, a ‘very clear creed’. But do we?

He says: ‘We are all British. We respect democracy and the rule of law. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, equal rights regardless of race, sex, sexuality or faith.’

Little of this is true. Few regard themselves as British any more. Votes are bought by billionaire donations and incredibly expensive marketing. Democracy is surely not respected by the growing legions who don’t vote. And, as Mr Cameron acknowledged, there are now areas of this country where votes are rigged and voters intimidated for the first time since the days of Dickens.

Terror is rational. Terrorists know that it works, or why is Martin McGuinness invited to Windsor Castle these days?

Freedom of speech, for those who don’t accept multiculturalism or the sexual revolution, is increasingly limited, mainly by threats to the jobs of those who speak out of turn.

Mr Cameron is also plain wrong when he says our freedom stems from democracy. Democracy these days involves agreeing with whatever slogans the Murdoch press is shouting.

Our freedom comes from the 1689 Bill of Rights, which he doesn’t seem to know exists, from Magna Carta, which he can’t translate, from Habeas Corpus, which has been whittled away on the excuse of counter-terrorism, and from jury trial, which is fast disappearing. Freedom of speech certainly can’t be defended by banning ‘hate-preachers’, which Mr Cameron is so proud of doing. Freedom of speech is freedom above all for those whose views you dislike most.

Nor can it be strengthened by demanding that people publicly declare that they don’t hold certain opinions. Mr Cameron actually said: ‘We must demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism too. Being tough on this is entirely in keeping with our values’.

How on earth is he going to make this happen? Electric shocks until they get their minds right? Personally, I’d much rather know that such people held these frightful views, than have them forced to pretend they didn’t.

Then there is: ‘We need to put out of action the key extremist influencers who are careful to operate just inside the law, but who clearly detest British society and everything we stand for.’

Put out of action? If they are inside the law, which protects the freedom Mr Cameron so values, what does this foggy phrase mean? Sandbagging them as they come out of the mosque?

I’m also not very reassured that we have a Premier who thinks he can advise TV companies on who they should and should not invite on to the airwaves. I think we can all see where that leads.

Mr Cameron and Mr Blair, and their predecessors over decades, have gone a long way towards Islamising this country through uncontrolled immigration and state multiculturalism. They have begun to panic, because they at last realise what they have done, and rightly fear they cannot stop it.

For a moment or two, I thought my media colleagues were finally going to grasp the fact that cannabis use is now more legal in this country than it is in Amsterdam.

When an actual Police and Crime Commissioner can come out and say that he doesn’t think his force can be bothered to pursue small-scale cannabis farmers – and is not then disavowed or removed – that should be clear enough.

But the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby needs to make the false claim that we groan beneath a harsh regime of ‘prohibition’, under which harmless persons are ‘criminalised’ for supposedly victimless crimes.

By claiming this, it can win what it really wants – cannabis on open sale in the high street and the internet, marketed and advertised. Many politicians, frantic for new sources of money to service our gigantic national debt, also long to tax it. So the truth, that cannabis has been decriminalised in this country for decades, cannot be acknowledged.

And the other truth, that this very nasty drug is strongly correlated with lifelong mental illness, must also be suppressed.

Hardly a week passes when I do not hear a new story of a youthful cannabis user becoming mentally ill, his life and the lives of his family wrecked for ever.

How strange, in a country which frowns on greasy fast food and sugary drinks, and which rightly discourages alcohol and tobacco, that the legalisation of this dangerous poison is considered a noble and liberating cause.

A touching Tango on the road to Nazi disaster

One of many good things about the excellent new film 13 Minutes – about a failed attempt to kill Hitler in 1939 – is its thoughtful portrayal of Germany and Germans as they slid relentlessly and unconsciously downwards into disaster.

Like us, they had their carefree moments – would-be assassin Georg Elser (played by Christian Friedel) is here shown dancing an impromptu tango with his mistress Elsa (Katharina Schüttler).

But power and evil march on regardless, ruining the lives of those who ignore them.

New release: 13 Minutes is about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939 with Christian Friedel and Katharina Schüttler, pictured

It is enjoyable watching the Warmist fanatics trying to cope with a 41 per cent increase (yes, 41 per cent) in the volume of Arctic ice in 2013.

According to their dogma of relentless man-made climate change, it shouldn’t have happened. But it did.

Any rigid ideology ends up not being able to cope with facts, and either suppressing them or bending them.

Meanwhile, we close perfectly good coal-fired power stations and risk blackouts, especially if it is, once again, colder than the Warmists expected.

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22 July 2015 1:05 PM

I know by heart the first two verses of Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’, the warning that ‘if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars’, and that apparent defeat may conceal real victory. I used to say them softly to myself quite a lot, when it seemed as if the various battles I have fought for the last 15 years were lost.

I don’t bother these days, since the total failure of my main project, namely the destruction of the Conservative Party. Hopes were dupes. Fears weren’t liars. It really is that bad. Through the most dishonest manifesto in modern history, and the use of huge piles of hedge-fund money in immensely clever and brilliantly-targeted direct marketing schemes, the Tory Party achieved what I had thought and hoped would be impossible, its first national parliamentary majority for 18 years.

Even so, I sense that some of my micro-battles, tiny guerrilla struggles and coastal raids behind enemy lines, are not as doomed as the main project. I think the obvious truth and force of the grammar school argument has genuinely penetrated the public mind, and even the elite mind, and the terrible error of 1965 may at least partly be undone before I die.

So perhaps I had better learn the second half of the poem, which runs:

‘For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

Comes, silent, flooding in, the main.

‘And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.’

Now two of my other campaigns, on ‘antidepressants’ and marijuana, are also beginning to get a hearing, through the white noise of conventional wisdom.

has alerted many people to a fact I’ve known for years and which I tried to make better-known through my book ’The War We Never Fought’. I failed because the book was destroyed by a canny mixture of abuse and silence, and the people at whom it was aimed don’t know I’ve written it , what it says or even that it exists.

Our laws against cannabis are vestigial and wilfully unenforced. They are maintained on the books only to fool conservative-minded voters and gullible politicians (and journalists) into thinking that there is still a serious effort to combat drugs which have, in effect long been decriminalised.

There are several reasons for this, one being the continued existence of international treaties which oblige us to maintain these laws on the books, but don’t tell us how we should enforce them.

But the main one is that much of our elite is already corrupted by drug-abuse, its own and that of its children. And the next one is that powerful forces, which are working night and day for total legalisation, open commercial sale and heavy taxation, need to maintain the pretence that the current laws are oppressive.

This falsehood, widely believed, enables them to recruit to their cause gullible simpletons who can be made to think that the law against cannabis is an affront to the liberty of the individual. These dim dupes can then imagine that they are fighting for a noble cause as they act as unconscious advocates for one of the most cynical billionaire lobbies in the world, one that hopes to make still more billions out of human misery, and is on the moral level of Big Tobacco.

Crucially, it also enables them to claim that the many problems caused in our society by drugs are the result of a non-existent ‘prohibition’, when the truth is the almost exact opposite. The widespread and tragic abuse of drugs in our society is the *consequence* of 40 years of unofficial decriminalisation. It will be far worse if we are fool enough to take the next step – to full legalisation .

This plan is falsely described as ‘regulation’ by its slippery advocates, falsely because this so-called ‘regulation’ will actually be deregulation by comparison with the current state of affairs, unleashing a hideous free-for-all in the dangerous drug market.

Anyway, apart from the Durham incident, we also have more evidence of my suggestion that there is a correlation between drugtaking and the violence in our midst which we often seek to explain purely as terrorism, when in fact its perpetrators have been driven out of their minds by legal or illegal drugs.

I have studied these cases so often that I now know that it will usually be just a matter of time between the report of the outrage and a (much less prominent) story about the perpetrator’s drug problem.

A few evenings ago, reports came in of a supposed terrorist atrocity in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Apart from the unlikelihood of the So-called Islamic State targeting military facilities in such a place, I immediately thought that there were features of this (especially the lone killer) which made it likely that it was an act of madness. Very quickly it emerged that the killer, Mohammod Abdulazeez, had previously been pulled in by police for driving under the influence, while stinking of marijuana and with a crust of white powder round his nostrils.

Now it turns out that he was a ‘deeply troubled young man who struggled with mental illness and drug abuse at the same time’ and who had also been ‘medicated’ by doctors in his school years then ‘turned to drugs and alcohol’, then lost a job for failing a drug test. His diaries, written shortly before his crime, are described by those who have read them as ‘gibberish’ .

In this he is similar to almost all of the drifters and drug-abusers who have been involved in two recent murders of soldiers in Canada, the Lee Rigby outrage, The Charlie Hebdo murders and the linked killings in and around Paris, the Tucson, Arizona attack in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others were badly wounded, and six people died . Not to mention the entirely non-political killings of Palmira Silva by Nicholas Salvador, and of Jennifer Mills-Westley by Deyan Deyanov (both these, horribly, involved the beheading of the victim, an act commonly associated with Islamist fanatics).

Then there was the utterly irrational and purposeless (but dreadfully violent) killing of Alan Greaves, a Church organist, by two known cannabis users in Sheffield. The thread which runs through these incidents and which, I suspect, runs through many more less-reported ones, is that the killers were drug-abusers and that they behaved in a wholly unhinged and irrational fashion.

My first interest in this was stimulated by what still seems to me to an extraordinary correlation between the use of legal ‘antidepressant’ medication and rampage killings. Many of these killings are scantily reported in the British press, because the numbers of dead and wounded are – comparatively – small. So I sometimes contact local journalists in the USA to ask for details. I found that, in some cases, there was genuinely no trace at all of the use of ‘antidepressants’, but there were suggestions of marijuana use. Over some years of examining such cases, I came to the conclusion that this is still a correlation which badly needs investigating, a correlation between mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, and irrational acts of severe violence. Such an investigation would need a lot of money and a lot of power, especially to demand the opening of sealed medical records which are a surprisingly common feature in such cases. I believe this is also still a problem in finding out exactly what ‘medication’ the German wings pilot who deliberately crashed his plane , Andreas Lubitz, may have been taking. I have to ask who benefits from this secrecy.

I’d add at this point that the linked problem of ‘antidepressants’, drugs whose efficacy seems to me to be unproven and whose side-effects are beyond doubt, also seems at last to be getting some attention . Though again, people seem unable to see what is in front of their noses.

I watched the start of a BBC News Channel programme on Monday. I think the first three individuals who spoke said how ‘antidepressants’ had a) done them no good and b) been very hard to relinquish. Rather than pursuing this, the presenter then went off into a general discussion about how mental illness was still not treated as the same as physical illness, which is undoubtedly true and also not wholly irrational, given the absence of objective diagnoses in this field.

This followed a powerful article in the ‘The Times Magazine’ last Saturday, which is behind a paywall, but which I urge you to read. In it, Luke Montagu, the future Earl of Sandwich, recounts his experiences with ‘antidepressants’ .

Here’s a small sample:

‘For the past 20 years, Montagu had been taking antidepressants - first Prozac, still new back then, now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs of all time, subsequently other common antidepressants such as Seroxat.

‘Yet when he was first prescribed these drugs at 19, Montagu was not depressed and had never been diagnosed with depression. He was a student at New York University, and had recently undergone a general anaesthetic for a sinus operation that left him with headaches and feeling, as he puts it, "not myself".

‘Without carrying out any tests, a British GP announced that he had a "chemical imbalance of the limbic system" and prescribed Prozac. Montagu, "impressionable and in awe of doctors", swallowed them unquestioningly.’

You’ll have to read the whole thing to find out all the dreadful things which followed.

But the bit which rang the strongest bell with me was this ‘One of the worst things the family has had to endure has been the scepticism of others. Antidepressants and sleeping pills are everywhere - one in three British women will take antidepressants in her lifetime and one in ten men. People don't like to hear that something supposed to make them feel better might actually be harmful.’

Once people have themselves been prescribed these things (last year there were 57 million ‘antidepressant’ prescriptions in England) they become advocates of them. They want to believe they are being helped. So they refuse even to consider that they might possibly have been prescribed a useless or even harmful drug.

Like so much of modern life, the whole thing reminds me of that great and terrible film ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’. People cease to be who they were, and those who notice and complain are vilified and isolated.

And yet, and yet, if such an article can appear in such a place, perhaps a painful inch has in fact been gained.

05 July 2015 1:59 AM

Politicians react to terrorism much as parents might respond when their lisping tiny offspring come home from sex-ed classes and ask them to explain what lesbians do. They panic.

They have no idea what to say and they are terrified of committing themselves, rightly suspecting that their answers will be stored up and embarrassingly remembered years later.

But they have to pretend to know. And so they talk drivel.

I have watched this for years, with growing, grim amusement. But last week they outdid themselves, churning out gallons of swirling hogwash.

The most ridiculous of all was (as usual) the comically unqualified Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan. Attempting to explain the latest goofy, futile plan to root out extremism in the classroom, she groped for an example.

How could teachers spot a potential fanatic, who was in danger of rejecting British values and might end up waving an AK-47? You could almost hear the poor woman’s brain flapping wildly from side to side.

Then she reached for the one thing that absolutely everyone is now compelled to agree on, if they don’t want the thought police and everyone on Twitter to think they are an extremist.

‘Sadly, Isis are extremely intolerant of homosexuality,’ she gabbled.

Alas, until quite recently, Ms Morgan took a position which could, in these days of sexual liberation, be viewed as ‘extremely intolerant’ of homosexuality.

‘Marriage, to me, is between a man and a woman,’ she said in February 2013, after voting against same-sex weddings. This view, she argued, tied in with her Christian faith.

She has since had the politically correct technicians in to adjust her brain, and said in October last year that she had changed her mind, though it wasn’t quite clear how she had done this. The fact is that, in her previous state of mind, she could quite easily have been reported to the police by some zealous sneak, under her own guidelines.

Even more hilarious (if you find this sort of thing funny) is the fact that homosexuality is now officially a fundamental British value.

It’s true that the French have always claimed this was so, especially in the upper reaches of our ruling class, but I have never before heard it confirmed by a Minister of the Crown.

This was followed closely by a widely publicised attempt to spread fear and despondency, by mocking up a gun battle in the middle of London, in which men dressed up as terrorists ran about shooting off blanks, and a woman lay groaning in the street.

I can think of few ways better designed to help Islamic terrorists in their task of frightening us all into a state of quivering funk.

Then there was the Prime Minister’s weird attack on the BBC for using the term ‘Islamic State’. This was very ungrateful, given the Corporation’s huge efforts to rehabilitate the Tory Party, after it turned liberal and decided that homosexuality was a core British value.

If we can’t use the term ‘Islamic State’, on the grounds that it’s not Islamic or a state, then surely we can’t use the term ‘Conservative Party’ either. It certainly isn’t conservative, and I’m not sure it has enough members left to be called a party.

But our glorious rulers were not done yet. To crown a week of wild floundering, the Government announced that our few remaining bombers will soon be fighting alongside President Assad of Syria.

Two years ago they wanted to use the same aircraft to bomb Mr Assad.

Four years ago they did use them to overthrow the Libyan government. As a result Libya is now a failed state, where the man who murdered 30 British men and women in Tunisia is said to have been trained. Had our Prime Minister not bombed Libya, Seifeddine Rezgui could not have been trained there.

I can think of no simpler way of explaining what a stupid mistake this action was. Yet the man who made it still sits in Downing Street posing as a world leader.

Our Government do not know what they are doing. Let us hope that they all calm down before they do any more damage.

Anna's gripping drama, and a very troubling thought

I was gripped, against all my instincts, by Anna Friel’s performance as a female soldier who suddenly finds her own side is the enemy, in BBC2’s Odyssey.

Perhaps I’ve had enough of thrillers with plots so subtle that you can’t work out who’s good and who’s bad.

Perhaps, after years in which I genuinely believed that our Government and the Americans were a pretty straightforward force for good, I now find it harder to accept, having seen the wrong and foolish things we do in the Middle East and now also in Ukraine.

It’s hard to be a conservative patriot when your beloved country is run by people who aren’t conservative patriots

Why do we need a new gigantic airport?

I still don’t understand why we need a gigantic airport sprawled across South East England. What does it gain us, compared with the misery of noise, pollution and congestion it causes in our cramped country? Would it really be so bad if we had to take a train to Paris or Amsterdam to fly to the USA?

Why the obsession with grandiose projects, such as new runways and the mad, useless HS2, when the shocking scandal of the broken promise on electrifying our decrepit, low-speed railways passes without scandal? The abandoned plans were specifically promised in a Tory manifesto published only a few weeks ago (pages 11, 13 and 14, if you want to check).

I know politicians lie habitually, but this is surely the most blatant false prospectus of modern times. Yet nobody has even resigned.

Greece isn't the only debt dodger

Whatever happens this weekend, the poor Greek people are helpless in the hands of dogmatic zealots who want to save a political project, the euro, at all costs.

For them it must be much like waking up in the middle of an operation and realising the doctors are all mad and cannot hear you. Of course, their past governments were to blame for swallowing the promises of magical prosperity that came from Brussels. But why should ordinary people pay for this?

I see no end to this except more pain. But those who smugly lecture the Greeks for being in debt should recall that Germany was once a prostrate debtor nation, too, and was forgiven, and that in 1934 Britain defaulted on war debts to the USA worth about £225billion in today’s money.

Most people think we have paid them off, but we haven’t.

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01 July 2015 2:42 PM

I can’t predict the future, as I know to my cost. But it’s generally pretty easy to see how the pro-drug lobby, its shills and dupes, will react to anything I write on the subject.

So I can usually build in defence mechanisms against foreseeable lines they will take. Do these defences work? Well, possibly for others, but not, it would seem, against them. One thing about the drug lobby is that it *simply does not listen* to what its opponents say. I cannot count the number of debates I have had, on broadcast forums, on the web or in public meetings, where my pro-drug opponent simply pays no attention at all to anything I have said. Howard Marks has been a rare exception, which is why I exempt him from the exasperated contempt I feel for almost all these people.

He listens, learns and comes back with an improved case. Perhaps it’s his old-fashioned, pre-cultural revolution grammar school and Oxford scientific education kicking in. Howard was taught how to think. Most of my opponents, and almost all of their audiences, have been taught what to think.

The BBC, furious that I actually stood up to its beloved Professor Nutt, has pretty much excluded me from the airwaves on the subject of drugs, where in many cases its ‘debates’ on the subject are disgracefully one-sided and simply exclude any voice which does not favour weaker laws. It gets round this by giving airtime to vacuous ministers, who pretend to be ‘tough’ , and assure the public they have no plans to get rid of the existing laws while continuing to preside over a state which ensures that the ostensibly punitive laws against drug possession are not in fact enforced.

A fascinating sideline on this has been the recent legislation on ‘legal highs’, which contains no penalties for *possession* at all, only for sale and distribution - an exact parallel to the *de facto* state of the laws on cannabis. The laws against simple possession are more or less unenforced, except in various circumstances where they are useful to the police as holding or alternative charges for people they can’t actually prove a case against in other matters. After all, the material possession of cannabis can be proven in court more readily than most offences, and anyone charged with it is going to have a hard time pleading not guilty if cannabis has been found on their person.

…was on the basis of correlation. I hadn’t shown it, they claimed. Where was my evidence? Well, in a sense this was just obtuse. I *had* shown that , in a number of prominent terror and mass-murder cases ( and in a number of ‘ordinary’ criminal cases which I assembled in my old blog posting ‘High and Violent’, to which I linked), the culprit had been found by the authorities to be a cannabis user. That’s correlation.

I had conceded, to be scrupulous, that in some cases I couldn’t show this was so. Nor could anyone else know that it wasn’t. There was just no information. I sometimes wonder whether to bother to *be* scrupulous, if my opponents are going to respond by saying that this is in some way evidence of the weakness of my case. I was pointing out that I knew the evidence wasn’t universally confirmatory, but that I still believe it to be strong enough to merit further investigation.

More than that, I also referred to other cases in which wholly different drugs (Steroids in the case of Raoul Moat and Anders Breivik, ‘antidepressants’ in some others) seemed also to be correlated with violent acts. My argument has never been about cannabis alone. In fact my discovery of the cannabis-violence correlation came *after* my discovery of the correlation between ‘antidepressants’ and violence, which is itself a step on from my original concern about the correlation between ‘antidepressants’ and otherwise inexplicable suicide.

Now, here is the key passage in which I armoured my case against predictable criticism. I have emphasised the passage which seems to me to have been particularly important:

‘There appears to be a correlation between the use of this drug and violent, irrational acts, a correlation so strong and so frequently observed in prominent events that it seems to me that we need a proper inquiry to see if it is significant. We know about the correlation because such horrors are much more intensively covered by the media and investigated by the authorities than other crimes. It is reasonable to contend that if other, less noteworthy crimes of violence were subjected to the same scrutiny, similar correlations might well emerge.’

Let me say that again. The correlation in this necessarily small number of cases is significant because it is only such high-profile cases which attract the sort of attention necessary to obtain the facts. I am a journalist, one person with many interests and nobody but me to do my research. I have limited (that is to say almost no) access to case files, police and court records. I am unaware of thousands of crimes that are prosecuted every year, and scores of deaths that are subject to inquests each year, because the media do not report them at all, or do so so scantily and in such obscure places that I could never keep track of them.

Only an inquiry, of the kind for which I call, could take us to the next stage of correlation. In many cases, as the police and the media are not interested and don't ask when the information is available, we may never know if drugs were involved in most past cases because nobody tried to find out. The inquiry would require police and courts to ascertain and record such facts in all violent crimes and in all suicides.

One other point. I’m also accused of saying that, because such killers were cannabis users, their Islamism (where present) is irrelevant. I don’t recall ever having said this, because I don’t think it. Their choice of targets can be said without doubt to have been influenced by this on several occasions. But not, crucially, on all occasions.

The man who beheaded Jennifer Mills-Westley did not do so because he was an Islamist. He wasn't one. Nor did the man who opened fire in a crowded street in Tucson, Arizona. He wasn't one either. These actions, horribly similar to killings committed by men who *were* Islamists, took place with no religious or coherently political aim.

The question is not what politics or non-politics may have moved these people, but what made them able to do such dreadful things to their fellow-creatures (and in general to be so happy about it afterwards) . The inhibition against doing violent harm to fellow creatures is common to all of us, and very strong, or the streets would run with blood. It takes very powerful forces to overcome it, as military training experts well know. The thing they have in common, the Islamists and the non-Islamists, is cannabis, or some other potent mind-changing drug. Why is this simple point so hard to get across? Because the Big Dope Billionaire Lobby is incommoded by it and doesn't want to acknowledge it. The recognition of such a link, by a proper inquiry, would halt in its tracks their almost-complete campaign for legalisation. They know that. So they don’t argue. They obfuscate, in the hope you’ll be fooled. Don’t be.

And yet, still, I get nit-picking resistance, and claims that I have prejudged the matter. Can anyone be surprised that I get exasperated with the Big Dope Dupes?

By the way, the links below may be of interest to those who have taken part in the separate discussion on the drug laws of Tunisia. I think they tend to support my view that enforcement of these laws is episodic, probably not that consistent and just, perhaps, subject to corruption. :

Huffington Post reports here that 3,000 dinars is the ‘price’ of a clear urine test, and that law is widely abused as a catch-all employed against people the police want to get anyway, rather than against drug consumption as such.

It contained, in an almost throwaway line, the following fact: ‘Last night, a Tunisian Interior Ministry source said that while [the Sousse murderer Seifeddine] Rezgui did not have a criminal record, he was known to authorities for "low level radicalism" and was once stopped by police for smoking cannabis.’

Just in case anyone thinks I played any part in this, they are very much mistaken. The reporter on the spot (we still do that on the MoS) discovered the fact and recorded it, unprompted by me and unknown to me.

Now, I suspect you’d have to be pretty dogged about smoking cannabis in Tunisia for the police to bother you or keep a record of it. So I doubt if this was a first offence.

So what?

Well, so, there seems to be a bit of a pattern here.

Let me just restate: the culprits of the 2011 Tucson massacre,at which Congreswoman Gabrielle Giffords was terribly wounded and six people died, the culprits of the beheading of Jennifer Mills Westley in Tenerife, of the beheading of Mrs Palmira Silva in London, of the grotesque murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich, of the Charlie Hebdo and related killings in Paris, of the killings of two Canadian soldiers in the past year, of the bludgeoning to death of Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, not to mention a large number of other notably violent and deranged, irrational crimes ( see: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/high-and-violent.html ) have all been revealed to be cannabis users. Now this killer has been revealed to be a cannabis user too.

What does this mean? What claim am I making?

It means that there appears to be a correlation between the use of this drug and violent, irrational acts, a correlation so strong and so frequently observed in prominent events that it seems to me that we need a proper inquiry to see if it is significant. We know about the correlation because such horrors are much more intensively covered by the media and investigated by the authorities than other crimes. It is reasonable to contend that if other, less noteworthy crimes of violence were subjected to the same scrutiny, similar correlations might well emerge.

It’s not the only such correlation. There is, for instance, a well-established and widely-acknowledged correlation between alcohol and violence, so strong that we all accept unhesitatingly that causation is involved - which is not disputed and which nobody needs to point out. Imagine, though, if the powerful alcohol lobby and its willing dupes waged a campaign against any journalist who sought to suggest such a correlation. That's how it is with cannabis. Just say this and a howling storm of lies and abuse will gather round your head.

This correlation informs the law’s attitude (criminal and civil) towards alcohol, and the media’s attitude, and our culture’s attitude. But at present there is a widespread belief in our culture that cannabis is harmless, and that it promotes peaceful and indeed passive behaviour. If this were to be found to be untrue, the attitudes of law, media and culture would need to change quite sharply.

Above all, the highly successful and well-funded campaign for cannabis legalisation would face a new and serious hurdle, just as it seemed to be in sight of success. This point explains the large number of vituperative and unresponsive comments this information will attract here and has already attracted on Twitter.

The correlation is significant because the drug is indisputably mind-altering, which is why people take it.

It is significant because it is also correlated with mental disturbance in general .

This is why such remarks as ‘these killers all breathed air’, or ‘ these killers all had eggs for breakfast’ are childish obfuscation. Air and eggs don’t alter the mind, cannabis does. That’s why the correlation is potentially meaningful rather than coincidental.

So, am I saying that everyone who smokes cannabis is a mass killer? Of course not, though, again, the cannabis comment warriors will be quick to suggest that this is my case, in the hope of fooling as many people as they can.

I am suggesting that these worrying and frightening instances are extreme examples of a general problem which is quite serious in its mildest form: that cannabis is correlated with the unpredictable alteration of the personality of those who use it.

This would surely put a stop to any talk of general legalisation of this drug. It would also damage its cunningly-created image as a ‘soft’ drug, and as a potential medicine. What’s ‘soft’ about a lifetime on the locked ward, or taking powerful antipsychotic drugs? Nothing. Who’d take a medicine with such potential side-effects? Only a fool.

Causation is extremely problematic here for two reasons. The first is that our knowledge of the workings of the brain, and of the relation between brain and mind, are almost unbelievably scanty and crude.

Trying(for instance) to draw conclusions about a person’s thinking or mental states from brain scans is like trying to work out what someone is saying in the Dog and Duck in Hampstead by studying a satellite picture of London by night. The brain does indeed alter physically after many experiences, from learning the ‘Knowledge’(the London Taxi drivers’ demanding test of their detailed knowledge of London streets) to taking drugs. But that is all we know. The brain alters. We can say *that* this has happened. But we are stuck to explain how, or why, or what it means.

And ,as James Davies points out in detail in his book ‘Cracked’, the diagnosis of mental illness is amazingly flexible, vague and subjective.

It may even be that, in the end, correlation (the basic tool of epidemiology, after all) is what we are left with. Those who wish to claim there’s nothing to be learned from these coincidences will chant ’Correlation is not Causation’, like a brigade of Red Guards singing the praises of Chairman Mao.

But we can say softly back ‘Indeed it is not. But correlation is also not necessarily *not* causation, either’.

And we can say, after the horrors of Sousse, and the many lesser horrors being played out among young people, in this country whose cannabis use has been followed by many and various disturbing symptoms, that those who listen to warnings are wiser than those who ignore them.

And that, with a billion-dollar market about to open up before their eyes, and a huge tax take as well, those who try to silence such warnings may not have the purest of motives.

Mohammed Emwazi, the person now widely known as ‘Jihadi John’, was a drug-addled drifter, and regular cannabis-smoker, before he embraced Islamist fanaticism.

This has now proved to be the case with the killers of Lee Rigby, with two recent Islamist killers in Canada, with all the culprits of the recent Islamist killings in Paris, and the Copenhagen killer, Omar el-Hussein

I just thought I’d mention it. It still seems to me to be a link worth investigating. And while we investigate it, silly politicians and others who seek to weaken the already feeble laws against this allegedly soft drug should surely cancel their plans.

After recent research showing a link between cannabis and mental illness, and graphic demonstrations of its power to bend the human mind in a recent TV programme, its popular image as a harmless recreation badly needs re-evaluating

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01 March 2015 12:13 AM

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Please permit me not to care about ‘Jihadi John’, whose participation in a series of gruesome videos has made him a useful frontman for his murderous accomplices.

They love to provoke us into more futile flailing and squawking about the need to fight back. Most of this fightback consists of adjectives, the only weapons this country now possesses in any quantity. Watch out for them, rolling by like a verbal Red Square parade: ‘Horrific!’, ‘cowardly!’, ‘extremist!’.

Islamic State’s strength depends greatly on its ability to mesmerise Western media.

And the idea of a Londoner presenting the group’s macabre videos might have been designed by a public relations man who understands exactly what makes the British mass media salivate.

Even so, there’s very little we can do about it. Terror is all about nasty surprises, and MI5, for all its poker-faced grandeur, cannot predict the future. Nor will it help anyone to ban Islamist blowhards from speaking at university meetings. It will just make us look silly.

If you’re worried about an Islamist threat to Britain, Jihadi John isn’t the problem. That’s to be found in the astonishing figure of 300,000 net migrants into Britain last year. A fair number of them will be Muslims, reinforcing what is rapidly becoming a highly influential minority in this country.

As we saw in an interesting poll, these Muslim fellow citizens don’t want to chop our heads off or murder us. They are reasonable, peaceful people who make better neighbours than many indigenous Britons.

But they think differently from us about the world. And they believe in something, which most of us do not. That’s the chief difference between us. And bit by bit, as they become more numerous and find their way into our institutions, helped by their competence, self-possession and sobriety, they will change society into one that suits them.

I don’t see how this process can be stopped now. I sympathise with a lot of their concerns, though I greatly dislike their attitude towards women. Like them, I find our way of life tawdry, immoral and often debauched. I just wish we had found our own British, Christian solution to these problems.

But we turned our back on patriotism and the church long ago. And round about the same time, we opened our borders, so wide that I do not think we will ever be able to close them again.

This thing has happened. We are going to have to try to learn to live with it as best and as kindly as we can, for the alternative is horrible. But I for one will never forgive those who allowed this to happen to what was one of the world’s great civilisations.

Bear warning is just hot air

Liberal leftists love to laugh at Mormons, but the Climate Change Cult, to which leftists all belong, makes Mormonism look mild and undogmatic. In a way it’s lucky that the Warmists (perhaps we should call them the Warmons?) have the BBC to do their missionary work for them, or we’d never get them off our doorsteps.

You can almost see the Warmists’ brains glaze over as they start to make their incantations about carbon dioxide. And, like the Book of Mormon, the Warmist Bible is full of the most obvious twaddle, a yawning trap for the credulous.

Most blatant of all their falsehoods is the cult of the poor little polar bear, martyred symbol of man’s carbonic greed, stranded sadly on a melting ice floe as it contemplates a watery grave.

In fact these rather savage and uncuddly predators are doing extremely well just now, with numbers at record highs thanks partly to the plentiful supply of nice fat seals in Arctic seas (yes, they eat those sweet little seals). As Susan Crockford in a new report on the bears says: ‘On almost every measure, things are looking good for polar bears. Scientists are finding that they are well distributed throughout their range and adapting well to changes in sea ice. Health indicators are good and they are benefiting from abundant prey. It really is time for the doom and gloom about polar bears to stop.’

And I also ought to point out one other thing. Polar bears can swim.

Dr Osborne's dodgy prescription

If you had stratospheric blood pressure, were grossly obese, lived a sedentary lifestyle and smoked constantly, what would you think of a doctor who told you to carry on as you were? That’s what I think of George Osborne, and of his admirers.

What can one do about those who are fooled by the Chancellor’s phoney boom, with its empty fake jobs, its miserable productivity, its galaxy-sized national debt, its swollen deficit and its dangerous housing bubble?

Perhaps I could quietly mention the external debt on our current account. This is the measure of Britain’s ability to pay its way in the world. And in the third quarter of last year it hit six per cent, a peacetime record, but not in a good way.

This is partly caused by an appalling trade deficit of £34.8 billion, plus a collapse in earnings on foreign investments, which were in surplus in 2011, and are now heavily in the red.

Have you, too, been forced by your bank to have a contactless credit or debit card which you can use without a PIN? Are you frequently urged by shop assistants to ‘pay by contactless’?

My advice is to object. The contactless system is an invitation to spend more, faster. It is, by its nature, insecure and means a lost or stolen card can be quickly used to make plenty of unverified purchases, while you are still trying to cancel it. And the £20 limit on contactless purchases will start to go up in September. How long before it is much, much higher?

Some companies will relent, and give you a non-contactless card. Others are obdurate. They should be challenged.

There was much trumpeting of a drop in teenage pregnancies last week, hilariously attributed to sex education programmes that frantically avoid mentioning abstinence or marriage, and assume promiscuity is normal.

If this ‘education’ is so effective, it’s odd that sexually transmitted diseases continue to be rampant, and Britain’s teen pregnancy rate remains among the highest in Europe.

Here’s another explanation – the ‘morning after pill’ now available over the counter to anyone who looks 16, and which makes sure that a one-night stand doesn’t lead to pregnancy. This charming treatment, by the way, was originally developed by vets, to stop pedigree poodles conceiving after a street-corner dalliance with the local mongrel.

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Perhaps my mistake was in giving my readers information intended to make them think. I am very tired of the weary drivel about the supposed Islamist threat, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘lone wolves’, usually accompanied by demands from MI5 and the politicians for more powers, and more money with which to enforce them.

Now, there are plenty of Islamist blowhards in this and other countries, who mutter privately or publicly about beheading the infidel, or who propagate Judophobic verbal sewage. And from time to time there are dreadful incidents in which such people get hold of weapons (or in some cases simply use cars for their purpose – shall we ban cars?) and kill.

I believe we should examine these events rationally. Can we prevent them? Possibly we can prevent some of them, though not by turning this country into a secret-police surveillance state , with every mosque monitored, every campus meeting checked for ‘extremism’ every e-mail and phone call logged and listened to. I do not think these things are organised by some central group, be it the fictional ‘Al Qaeda’ or the actually existing but very localised IS. There’s never been any evidence that the killers in Ottawa, Sydney, Copenhagen, Paris or London were under instructions from anyone but their own drug-frazzled and irrational minds.

In a rare break from the standard rhetoric, Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said last week that there was ‘no indication that Copenhagen shooting suspect Omar El-Hussein was acting on behalf of a larger terrorist network.

She added, in words that must have infuriated securocrats from Washington and London; ‘“He was known by the police for several criminal acts, including severe violence, and he was also known to be linked to a criminal gang in Copenhagen. But I want to also make very clear that we have no indication at this stage that he was part of a cell.’

It was soon afterwards that it was revealed that he had twice been arrested for cannabis offences. As I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/01/what-do-we-know-about-the-paris-outrages.html this was also true of the Paris murderers, and of several other recent killings, including the murder of a soldier in Ottawa. I recently discovered that the culprit of another soldier murder in Canada (this killer, like Lee Rigby’s, also used a car to make his first attack) was also a long-term marijuana user. I am fairly sure that the Sydney killer was, too. His bizarre record of crime, fantasy and erratic, wild irrationality stretched back for years, and Iran, from which he fled to avid fraud charges, has severe problems with drug abuse. But nobody has bothered to find out because of the desire, in Australia’s media and political worlds, to explain this purely as an Islamist event. And I cannot investigate it at this distance.

Am I saying, by pointing this out, that cannabis is the *cause* of these actions? No. First, it is people who commit crimes, not drugs. But I am pointing out an intersection, between crazy jihadism and heavy cannabis use, which seems to me to be to so prevalent that it *must* be worth investigating. At the moment, the authorities are not interested. After a recent school killing, I strove to find out if the culprit was a cannabis user.

But the police involved were very unwilling to answer the question, and I was left with the impression that they had never investigated it. Why should they? My interest in the dangers of cannabis is not shared by most of the media or by the state. My main aim now is to make sure that they are at least interested, and that this factor is at least looked into in all cases of severe violence.

Someone will always pop up on these discussions and tell me I am seeking to ‘excuse’ militant Islam. I am doing no such thing. Intolerant ideologues obviously play their part in putting these terrible desires into the minds of impressionable young men. But I doubt whether they would often get to the point of action if drugs were not involved.

Sane people don’t usually want to spend the rest of their lives in prison, or to be shot by the police. Sane people also usually see the problems involved in killing a fellow human being. Mad people don’t.

Which is why this also affects non-Islamists, as I showed with the case of Jared Loughner, in the case of the Sheffield church organist, Alan Greaves, and as I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/high-and-violent.html in a selection of court cases where violent or otherwise irrational offenders were stated in evidence to have been cannabis users. Like the Rigby killers, some of these attacked or destroyed with cars, others with sharp blades.

Finally, I reproduced the testimony of Matthew Parris and Jon Snow, who recounted the unexpected powerful effects of cannabis on them (and in Mr Parris’s case, mentioned the personality changes undergone by his respectable middle-class friends who were cannabis users) . I did so because I suspect many people are still beguiled by the drug’s image as ‘soft’, when in facts its immediate effect on the brain is violent and severe. Does it really seem unlikely that repeated exposure to such experiences render the user permanently damaged? And yet people still dismiss the correlation, saying that cannabis sue is no more likely to send people mad than drinking tea, growing a moustache or using a certain type of computer software.

We can now add to this the recent experience of the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd ( a policeman’s daughter), who bravely tried legal cannabis in a candy bar, so as to deepen her research into marijuana legalisation in Colorado.

She wrote

'I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

‘I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

‘It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.’

Yes, I know which bit of that the comment warriors will seize upon, and so do you. But it is the wrong bit. even in 16 pieces, this is *not a ‘soft’ drug. Later in the article, she said: ’But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

‘In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

‘As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.’

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18 February 2015 3:59 PM

After the horrors in Denmark on Saturday, I waited for the information I knew was coming to emerge. It did so on Monday night. The Copenhagen killer, Omar el-Hussein was (as I had been all but sure he would be as soon as I heard the news) yet another low-life petty criminal loser, whose brains had been addled by cannabis use, as were the culprits of the Lee Rigby murder, the Ottawa murder of the soldier Nathan Cirillo and the ‘Charlie Hebdo ‘ murders and the other killings linked to that incident. (I suspect that the Sydney killer also falls into this category, but so far as I know nobody has bothered to find out. He was certainly far from sane, and drug abuse is by far the most common predictor of insanity in this age).

The Danish newspaper Politiken quoted an acquaintance as saying he was a ‘heavy user’ of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug. Other reports said he had been arrested twice for possession of cannabis, but let off. Pity.

Now the costly PR campaign for cannabis is so powerful that this crucial information was barely mentioned, amid the usual sloshing drivel about radicalisation and Islamic terror. No doubt el-Hussein (who after a reasonably successful school career developed an uncontrollable temper and was imprisoned for randomly stabbing a commuter on a train). imagined that he was serving some cause. But he was a chaotic violent drifter with an addled mind, not the honed instrument of some global Islamist plot.

And if we want to see fewer such incidents we would get a lot further if we realised just how dangerous cannabis is, and acted accordingly, than we will by giving yet more money and power to pretentious and rather sinister ‘security’ organisations, who couldn’t stop a bus, let alone a terror attack.

You’d have thought it had been a bad week for cannabis, what with the new report in the ‘Lancet’ strongly linking Skunk cannabis with mental illness. And it might have become even worse, when the BBC favourite and liberal hero Matthew Parris recounted his experiences with the drug (under controlled conditions at the behest of a TV company) in an article (behind a paywall) in ‘The Times’.

You’ll have to subscribe to read the whole fascinating thing. I can share with you that Mr Parris wrote : ‘I have too many friends for whom prolonged and heavy use of cannabis has seemed destructive; too many for me to feel entirely at ease with words such as "mild" or "recreational" — or not in their case. Two friends, both in their forties, told me they smoked weed regularly, sometimes even in the morning, with the same result. "I think it changed me permanently as a person," one said.’

And also : ‘I have since interviewed friends who have been heavy users and talked to an old friend who was a distinguished clinical psychiatrist, to a younger psychologist she introduced me to and to his colleague in the London addiction centre where they work. I would describe all my interviewees as basically socially liberal, with no axes to grind, no drugs "agenda".

‘There is considerable agreement between all of them, users and health workers alike, that heavy use of cannabis, particularly skunk, can be associated with big changes in behaviour. One friend, a heroin addict now trying to kick the habit, told me that he had been finding it easier to hold down a job on heroin than when he was using cannabis, which he had stopped 12 years ago. Although he was pale and his hands shook, he seemed to be back to his old, pre-cannabis self. He talked about a friend he'd known for 30 years who had never stopped the cannabis and was now paranoid, convinced his neighbours were denouncing him.’

The Channel Four news presenter Jon Snow recounted a similar experience (undergone for the same programme) :

08 February 2015 12:13 AM

There are three months to go before the Election and we are already chest-deep in ludicrous partisan drivel. Funny that the more alike the parties are, the more slime they chuck over each other.

But education is a special case even in this miserable apology for a national debate. For instance, the Prime Minister is now promising an all-out ‘war on mediocrity’, which will be waged by nationalising as many schools as possible.

I suppose that means that all our children will be above average, yet another example of Mr Cameron’s strange arithmetic.

We already know he can’t tell the national debt from the deficit. He revealed in a TV documentary last week that he thinks three halves make a whole. His increase in school spending turned out to be a cut.

And, along with his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he didn’t dare answer a question on times tables.

Political maths, I suspect, work on a completely different principle, and have more to do with how much money you can squeeze out of a hedge-fund billionaire in a tax shelter.

Yet Ms Morgan had begun the political week by promising a new emphasis on the ‘three Rs’, and saying that all children leaving primary school should know their times tables.

Why, it was the forgotten Tory Education Secretary John Patten, in September 1992. In November 1994, another one, Gillian Shephard, launched a ‘school blueprint aimed at putting the “three Rs” at the centre of lessons’.

In January 1996, Shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett urged teachers to concentrate on the ‘three Rs’. A few days later Anthony Blair, then Opposition Leader, condemned the ‘appalling’ levels of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren. By January 1998, these two were in office, and Mr Blunkett was demanding, yes, a return to chanting times tables.

Apparently nobody was paying attention, because a year later it was revealed that ‘schoolkids will be going back to learning their times tables tomorrow as David Blunkett scraps 30 years of trendy maths teaching’.

In September 2004, they still weren’t listening, as an academic study demanded that ‘schoolchildren should be made to chant their multiplication tables in class’.

By August 2006, the Labour Education Secretary was Alan Johnson, who proclaimed that children would be fast-tracked through their times tables in a string of reforms to the way the ‘three Rs’ were taught in primary schools.

But by December 2010 it was reported that ‘one in four 11-year-olds leaves primary school without a proper grasp of the three Rs, according to detailed Government data released yesterday’.

And lo, in June 2012, Ms Morgan’s forerunner, Michael Gove, was reported to be planning to ‘tear up the rules’ about what must be taught in primary school. Among his plans, yes... times tables were to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school ‘for the first time in decades’.

There’ll be another Education Secretary along soon. Just wait for him or her to make the same pledge. And then laugh.

The only times table that actually applies to these people is the nought times table. A thousand times nought still makes nought. The only multiplication our children are reliably taught and encouraged to do is sexual reproduction.

And as long as our political leaders jointly refuse to restore order, authority and selection in the state schools, the result will be the same.

Don't fall for the sex education myth

People still mistakenly think that there is an important difference between the Tory and Labour parties over sex propaganda in schools.

On the contrary, both parties are entirely wedded to the radical sex-liberation policies of the 1960s, now the iron-bound law of the land, which it is dangerous to question, let alone disobey.

Mr Cameron, when he was still Leader of the Opposition in April 2010, had this exchange with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:

Paxman: ‘You’re in favour of faith schools being able to teach sex education as they like?’

Cameron: ‘Not as they like. That’s not right. What we voted for was what the Government suggested in the end, which is proper sex education...’

Paxman: ‘Should they be free to teach that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is wrong?’

‘No, and the [Labour] Government discussed this and came up with a good idea, which is to say that we wanted a clearer path of sexual education across all schools, but faith schools were not given any exemption, but they were able to reflect some of their own faith in the way that this was taught.

‘But no, you must teach proper lessons in terms of gay equality and also combat homophobic bullying in schools, I think that’s extremely important.’

I’d be interested to see evidence that such teaching does actually reduce bullying.

But in any case, it’s quite clear that the ‘Conservative’ Party has no serious differences with Labour on this.

If you don’t like Tristram Hunt’s latest plans for talking about sex to tots, don’t expect any help from the Tories.

I wonder what God makes of Mr Fry

My old adversary Stephen Fry (he calls me a ‘slug’) has been attacking God on TV, calling the Ancient of Days ‘capricious, mean-minded’, 'selfish’ and ‘a maniac’.

Obviously Mr Fry, left, gets to meet God quite a lot, being so important and all, but it would be good if someone could get the Almighty to let us know what He thinks of Mr Fry.

Falling into the Islamic State trap

I absolutely decline to watch horror videos showing fanatics murdering their prisoners. I am sure it is morally wrong to do so.

I am still haunted by my decision, when I was younger, to witness two lawful executions of heinous convicted murderers.

But aside from that, I believe these zealots hope we will watch this obscenity and as a result lose our reason and launch unwise and stupid attacks on them, which will end in our moral and physical defeat. Some people are already falling into this trap.

Arming Kiev

I have never doubted for a moment that Russia is aiding the rebels in Ukraine with men and munitions, though this is difficult to prove.

What puzzles me is that so many do not seem to suspect that the USA and other Nato countries are likewise helping Ukraine’s shambolic army fight the war we urged them to start. How naive can you be? The American threats to arm Kiev’s forces may already have been carried out, but by deniable and indirect routes (as happened in Afghanistan).

I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm in this country for getting involved in the third major European war in a century. What do we hope to gain?

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